Welcome to our new occasional feature, SpyFaces in the Crowd, in which we’ll offer mini-profiles of important players in U.S. intelligence that readers might not be familiar with.

Michael W. Ellis was on an ambitious Republican flight path even as a freshman at Dartmouth in 2002, although few of his classmates probably would have envisioned his swing far right into MAGA-land and eventual appointment two decades later as deputy director of the CIA in the second Trump administration.

NYPD Blue: The NYPD’s legendary counterterrorism unit is not being spared in the Trump administration’s budget cuts targeting Democrat voting districts.

Picture this: One of Israel’s top spies in Iran is a dentist. That’s right, you could say Mossad agent Kamran Esfahani is well positioned to look right into the mouths of Tehran’s senior officials. But that’s not to say The Persian is in any way a comic novel: It’s a deadly serious, if absolutely entertaining, journey into …

Last night the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act expired, 10 years after its passage, which mandated congressional reauthorization for its continuation no later than Sept. 30, 2025.

The moment has left many cybersecurity experts reeling.

Some key military intelligence agency operations will be shuttered if Congress fails to pass a budget bill by midnight tonight, according to a Pentagon planning document.

Not that you were fretting much about it, but secret operations at the CIA and other U.S. government intelligence agencies will mostly carry per usual (whatever that means) should Congress fail to come to a budget agreement and turn off the lights in many other offices at midnight Wednesday.

Of more immediate concern is the posture of worldwide U.S. combat forces this week with hundreds of their commanders en route from far flung posts to an all-flags-on-deck command meeting at Quantico ordered up by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, which President Trump later invited himself to, creating yet another level of security concerns.

On the Western Front: “Several European countries are recruiting spies in Russia again.” So claimed El Mundo, Spain’s leading paper of record, in a story by its resident historian and veteran war correspondent Alberto Rojas. In response to a dramatic uptick in “the activity of Russian intelligence, espionage, and sabotage in Europe today,” Rojas writes, “the secret services of several countries on the continent have gone on the offensive. They are no longer just monitoring Kremlin intrusions into their security systems or recruiting individuals in need of funds via Telegram to carry out certain tasks in exchange for cryptocurrencies. Now they want to rebuild networks on the other side of the new Iron Curtain.”

IT WAS ONE OF THE MORE DRAMATIC—SOME MIGHT SAY HEROIC—scenes from the post- 9/11 era. In the spring of 2002, then-FBI director Robert Mueller, was getting reports from his agents that CIA contractors were conducting brutal interrogations of a wounded terror suspect, complete with forced nudity, sleep deprivation, freezing temperatures and a planned mock burial, at an agency black site in Thailand. Appalled at what he was witnessing, one agent, Ali Soufan, called up headquarters. “I swear to God, I’m going to arrest these guys!” he shouted, threatening to cuff the contractors.

Mueller got the message. Get out of there, he ordered his agents—they were law enforcement officers, not goons.

Disinfo Derby. Russia never misses an opportunity to throw more gas on the fires of American politics, and so it went this month within hours of the Sept. 10 murder of conservative firebrand Charlie Kirk, with Moscow’s disinformation warriors “seeding social media with the frightening claim that America is slipping into civil war,” possibly involving elements of a “deep state,” the A.P. reported. “Chinese and pro-Iranian groups also spread disinformation about the shooting, with those loyal to Iran’s interests backing antisemitic conspiracy theories while bots linked to Beijing claimed that Kirk’s death shows that the United States is violent, polarized and dysfunctional.”

OUR JOB HERE is to review new books, films and TV shows related to intelligence and national security. Sometimes, though, old is hauntingly new. In the case of Stefan Zweig, who completed his memoir, The World of Yesterday, 83 years ago, the Austrian writer’s warnings about political complacency and the danger of war speak to us with profound immediacy.

The World of Yesterday comes with multiple lessons. As we review a book written before most of us were born, we look back with an old reminder: As Italo Calvino once wrote, “a classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers.” That’s certainly true of this 1942 classic, which speaks to us with a certain urgency.